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Live Long and Prosper

A lot of Star Trek fans who are even more passionate than I am will be sharing their thoughts all over the internet in the next few days. I can’t begin to match their stories of how the character of Spock, changed their lives. Some were able to live more happily by accepting their own differences, others will have been inspired to pursue careers in science and in writing. There will be a thousand good stories of the actor Leonard Nimoy, touching peoples hearts and minds at conventions, in interviews and with personal contact. I don’t have any of those stories. What I have is a heart that was touched by one of the least emotional characters in fiction. How can this be? It is simple, the actor who played the alien was a real person and the real person is what made the character someone we could care for. We have an emotional connection to Mr. Spock because of the friendship he had with the other main characters on Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Dr.McCoy .

Ethos, Pathos and Logos battled it out each week in an effort to solve the problems faced by the crew of the Enterprise. We usually discovered that it was not one path that leads to a solution but many combinations of these essential traits. That two humans with outsized personalities could find comradery with an emotionless, cold, half alien seems hard to believe, until you see the show. Then we know that friendship can be many things, including frustrating. Kirk and Bones would tease Spock but he never seemed to take it any way except in the way it was intended, as the gesture of a friend. Leonard Nimoy imbued the character with the capacity to be a friend, even if the nature of the character is to reject such an emotional relationship. Nimoy was accomplished outside of the Trek universe and he had much to be proud of in all his other work, but everyone knew that when this sad day came, this was the image of the actor that everyone would recall.

All of us will feel as if we were in this scene, unable to touch our friend as he left us, bereft of the friendship that has been a part of our lives for fifty years, and sad that as with all of us, the final frontier awaits.